Desperately Seeking Cybersex

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Desperately Seeking Cybersex

Apparently, the United States isn't the only country concerned with the ramifications of always-available porn and cybersex. O.Com: Cybersex Addiction, a new documentary from Canadian team Melanie Wood and Nick Orchard, explores the rising rates of internet sex addiction in Canada. According to the film, 8 million North Americans spend more than 11 hours a week – each – pursuing sex online.

Having recently tried to find good cybersex myself, I see why it's taking them so long. Where has all the good cyber gone?

In the olden days, you could find chat rooms where adults bantered, flirted and seduced one another in a supportive community. People developed relationships that ranged from casual friendship to erotic involvement to love affairs. A core of regulars would form, resulting in either a welcoming environment for newbies or an exclusionary, clique-driven hierarchy, depending on where you went.

And there were a lot of women in there.

But as one woman observed in the Sex Drive forum, chat has changed. "At some time I cannot pinpoint," she says, "a set of people started using chat as a way to make the contact to meet or call others for sex, like it was one big pool of people waiting for an offer.... Whatever happened to chatting to converse? It's getting more and more difficult to find someone who'll type more than three words a line and actually spell out words."

I looked, this past week, for good cyber. I haven't flexed that particular muscle in years, and I thought it would be fun to see if I, like Ralph Malph, still got it. Yet it was hard to find a chat room where people were indeed chatting, much less flirting or attempting intelligent seduction. Instead, it was "any white chikc want 2 talk to eas India guy?" and "hunny r u wering ur bikini?" Not exactly riveting.

It's possible that good cyber still exists, it's just not free. One friend tells me his membership fees for PalTalk have been worth it, getting him access to an "international circle jerk" where men and women come together by webcam and text. Another, a companion from my old chat room, says that swinger site AdultFriendFinder has "OK" online communities, although not as good as we were used to.

But I would expect a premium site with almost 16 million members to have at least one interesting chat room, wouldn't you? And good cyber must still exist, if 8 million people are addicted to it.

The problem is that it's hard to figure out exactly what researchers mean when they talk about online sex addiction. To me, porn and cybersex are such completely different animals, pursued for different reasons, that lumping them together doesn't give us any real answers about what people actually find addictive.

We've been talking about that in the forum, too. Porn is passive entertainment, and you seek it out as individuals or couples (or groups, I suppose) as something to inspire arousal and perhaps fulfillment. (As Carly Milne of Pornblography says, it's a condiment, not the entire meal. You wouldn't eat a bowl of mustard, would you? That's not filling.)

Cybersex, on the other hand, is active – interactive – and it involves a lot more than just your visual cortex.

Good cybersex requires imagination, communication, emotion. It always involves an element of suspense, because you can't be certain what the other person is going to do. Women gravitate toward cybersex rather than porn, because staged images cannot compete with interactivity and attention from real people.

But if O.Com is correct and even Canadians are spending too much time pursuing sex online, perhaps we should put some effort into figuring out why. What's so alluring about porn, or cybersex, that we cling to it in such massive numbers? Or is this just an obsession with the novelty of virtual sex, a rash of "addiction" that will wear itself out in the next few years?

Many Wired News readers have been online since we were children – I think I was 14 when I first watched my dad chat with a techie friend. That would have been 1985, when tech-savvy college students were having sex and trading porn on BBSes while the masses had barely heard of the internet.

But most people have not been online nearly that long; the percentage of American households with internet access didn't reach 50 percent until 2000. Considering how sophisticated our online sex technology has become, and how easy it is for newbies to find it, perhaps it's not surprising that we're experiencing a temporary epidemic.

And I do believe it's temporary. In "The Internet and Social Life," published in the Annual Review of Psychology: 2004, researchers John Bargh and Katelyn McKenna conclude that a rise in depression upon first using the internet is followed by increased happiness and real-world social activity among regular internet users – but that initial year or two seems to be a doozy for those who get carried away.

Already it's easy to find people who used to watch a lot of porn or stay up all night chatting, but who feel no compulsion to do so now. And among those, you'll find plenty of stories about how their involvement in the online sexual underground resulted in positive changes in their offline sex lives. Professor Aaron Ben-Ze'ev's book Love Online: Emotions on the Internet cites a number of examples of how cybersex has had positive effects for people, especially women, without downplaying the damage we can do to ourselves if we don't play it smart.

I expect the rates of online sex addiction to decline significantly after the novelty wears off and the majority of people learn that the internet really is just another tool, not an answer.

Meanwhile, if you know where the good stuff has gone, let me know. I promise to use it wisely.

See you next Friday,

Regina Lynn

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Regina Lynn is still waiting for her revised profile to be approved so she can check out the chat at AFF. You can e-mail her at ginalynn@gmail.com or visit her website to join the Sex Drive forum.